Author: Steffen

A model: four pillars of online engagement

pillarsI think I should start blogging. Twitter looks interesting. Think a Facebook fanpage will work wonders. Videos on YouTube  are just up our alley. And so on. These are the kinds of things going through the minds of plenty of communicators at any sort of organisation in Brussels (and elsewhere for that matter) who work on issues and policy areas in which they want to exert some influence. And for good reason. The tools are cheap and cheerful, they’ve been proven to work, they fit an age of public relations in which engagement and humility are the order of the day, and what’s more, they’re fun.

However, as enticing as the tools may seem and as easy as you may think it will be to just try, test and see, I’d stress that rather than dive in and use the tools from the off, it’s imperative to have a long-term online engagement plan and to take a step-by-step approach that will help maximise the potential of your efforts.

I’ve developed a basic 4-pillar model which can be applied to a lot of organisations seeking to engage online. By no means am I introducing any brand new concepts, but I think the model is handy in that it puts the various elements of engagement in the order in which they should go if an organisation starting anew wants to make the best of the opportunities on offer. Here goes.

1. Making sense of what’s out there: web as hub

This involves two bits: first, the listening piece (one of the prime social media clichés but oh so necessary), and second, making the listening set-up public via aggregation or hyperlinking.

The listening bit simply means that you perform a thorough analysis of what offline stakeholders are up to to online, as well as find online players who might not have an offline profile. You set up a dashboard so you can follow what they are communicating on a daily basis, and once you feel that you have a really good idea of how the issue is unfolding online, who the key content creators and influencers are, you make that knowledge public i.e. you “counter the fragmentation” and become the player that makes sense of the issue online and isn’t afraid of showcasing other stakeholders who might not tow the exact same line.

2. Start communicating: “show me, not trust me”

This is when you actually start communicating yourself in this new space; where you start showcasing action rather than staying quiet and hoping that people will trust you – hence “show me, not trust me”.

By performing step 1, you’ve got a good understanding of who the players are and what’s expected, you have some goodwill, and you’re unlikely to make any dumb mistakes. So you’re well placed to develop a strategy to communicate using social media within this space to showcase yourself, your take on your issue, and your people via, say, blogging or video (choice of tools is secondary, it largely depends on where the activity is, what your sector is etc.) In addition, you should use the space to show your third-party advocates, and remember, always remain respectful and honest.

3. Stakeholder dialogue

Steps 3 and 4 are the organic evolution of steps 1 and 2: they rely largely on the involvement of the online community which you can not control, so it’s about creating the right circumstances for that community to thrive rather than introducing a new set of tools.

By bringing information together and beginning to engage using the tools yourself, you should hopefully have begun a process by which an online conversation has taken off in which you are an important contributor. To get to this next level, where real dialogue is taking place, you need to carry on what you’re doing i.e. communicating a message that resonates and to make sure you are constantly feeding the conversation by replying to people’s questions and comments, and remember to always respond to community concerns and interests rather than spouting key messages.

Assuming you are doing all of this well, you have a fantastic opportunity to be leading and shaping “stakeholder dialogue” and thus take a thought leadership position on your issue.

4. Community and mobilisation

This is the holy grail of online communications. If steps 1-3 are successful, you may have created a community of people who mobilise on your behalf: these are people who support your position and spread your message for you without you actually being involved. In practice, this can involve anything from people simply sending your material to others, urging others to follow you on Twitter or sign a petition, to actively approaching legislators themselves.

As a benchmark on a huge scale for “community and mobilisation” I’d cite the Obama presidential campaign. It wasn’t the millions of Facebook followers who got Obama’s message directly in their Inboxes who were the root of the success, but the core supporters who mobilised on his behalf, whether by sending newsletters, arranging events or knocking on doors and so on.

Sure, Obama is Obama and we’re talking about a US presidential campaign, but on a smaller scale, the model is still relevant. By engaging with people, getting them excited about your issue, and giving them the right tools and content, you too can turn your supporters into ambassadors.

I’ll be following up on this post in the coming weeks to expand a little more on the 4 pillars. Would appreciate feedback.


Digital adoption by Brussels agencies

From a post on the “Behind the Spin” blog:

PR agencies currently fall into three distinct camps: consultancies that are embracing and actively creating the digital PR future by retooling their businesses; consultancies that believe digital calls for traditional techniques to be transposed to bloggers and via networks such as Twitter; and those that are standing still.

The post refers mainly to PR agencies in London, but I wonder if the same is true for PA/PR agencies operating in the Brussels bubble? I work for an agency that operates online and have never been at a traditional agency, so this is speculation on my part, but I’d say it sounds about right.

I suspect the “standing still” camp may be a little bigger in Brussels than London however, due to the nature of PA more than anything else. Most PA professionals have political backgrounds and are sector experts, not communicators. I’m not saying it’s a problem per se, except that their expertise is often not aligned with that of communicators, as some agencies don’t integrate especially well to the extent that they maintain a PA and comms hierarchy where the two disciplines are actually kept quite distinct rather than being two fully integrated parts of the same communications toolkit.

In addition, for Brussels (perhaps London as well) I’d add one more group to the three above: consultancies that want to embrace the web, understand its importance and what it can do, are tip-toeing, but are not fully committed because they struggle with how they would adapt their business model (I’ve heard this a few times.)

Like I said, this is largely speculation on my part. I might be wide off the mark, so I’d be curious to hear what other agency people have to say about this.

Countering fragmentation in Brussels by integrating and aggregating

jigsaw_puzzleThere’s too much fragmentation going on in Brussels. First there’s internal fragmentation of communications within organisations. Marketing are doing this, product guys doing that, issue specialists saying X, PR saying Y. Surely companies need to be better integrated. In particular, marketing and PA especially need to be telling the same story far more. Why? Because selling to consumers and legislators is a lot more similar than it was a few years ago. Marketing back then would have said: we’re cheaper and/or we’re better. PA would have said: we’re providing jobs and innovation. Now? They’re still saying that, but they’re both also saying “our company is a model citizen because of X, Y, and Z” and in this respect, there needs to be a lot more collaboration.

Beyond that, there’s what I’d call external fragmentation on issues, which is totally different, but is still about fragmentation, so I’ll put it in the same post. Call me lazy. What do I mean? That when looking at an issue for a client or prospect, everyone is always struck by the mess: multiple players at national level and pan-European level, public and private entities, associations and pressure groups, old media and bloggers. Even within the Commission say, DGs can have totally different priorities on an issue. People are talking about pharma this week: it’s now largely under DG Enterprise, but DG Sanco want it because surely Pharma is about health, they say. Whatever the outcome, fact of the matter is that their approach would be quite different.

In communications terms, what this fragmentation of players results is in turn a fragmentation of content and story which frankly makes an issue appear far more complex than you as an organisation want it to be. It’s hard to thrive within complexity because your story is one of a thousand; legislators might not have the time, the nous nor the willingness to really understand it well.

So what should you do about it? You create your own story that is tangible and relatively easy to digest of course. In addition, and more importantly, you should be the one player that makes sense of the fragmented landscape, and you can do it online. How? You become your issue’s portal by aggregating and hyperlinking content from all stakeholders in one online HQ available on your site – whether they’re private, public, competitors, pressure groups, media or bloggers.

What’s the point?

  • You’re doing people a favour by making things easier. They’ll appreciate it.
  • Making things easier will also enable people to understand your take on an issue more clearly, as well as understand it within the context of other stakeholders.
  • The base assumption is that your argument is valid and that most of the content you bring in backs up your story. Assuming that’s the case, the outside content you bring in will give you the 3rd party credibility you crave.
  • Becoming the focal point for web content will enable you to own the discussion online, naturally making you a key stakeholder rather than just one of many. Search comes into it too. By becoming an online hub, others will link to you and you’ll get better a search ranking on your key issues.
  • You’ll showcase both sides of the argument (again, assuming your side is strong) and thus prove that you’re a fair and open player.
  • You’ll have taken step one of the the four-step approach to online engagement. I’ll be building on this in the coming weeks, so watch this space.

Blogging as literature

Short post. I was in a meeting recently talking about blogging. The client, a literature buff, digressed a little and said he thought blogging was all well but a blog could never be truly “great” because the nature of the medium is such that the writing is fragmented, or lacks structure and flow.

I agreed with him. Not that it’s an issue of concern of course – the nature of the medium might not be suited to fine works of literature – but it’s extremely well suited to much else.

However, my colleague Jesus last week told me of a project called Cómo cazar un dragón which he’s working on with a Spanish writer. It’s a work of literature written as a blog, with the writer posting a chapter a week. Here’s the really interesting bit. Each new entry is influenced by readers’ comments following the previous post: people who leave comments can even subsequently become characters in the story. Brilliant concept, I think, and one that will soon result in a masterpiece no doubt!

Storytelling over big budgets

Title_storytellerA tale heard many times in varying incarnations in Brussels:

  • Big company X spends hundreds of thousands to get an independent report published by a reputable institution.
  • Takes months, the report is finally published and the company is happy: the facts support its side of the story (e.g. product Y is not nearly as dangerous as some say) and the report is truly independent, so case closed – or so they think.
  • What’s the story? Company X publishes “independent report” which proves so and so? No, that’s not interesting enough. The story becomes company X publishes supposedly independent report but pressure group Z says it can’t be trusted as it’s industry sponsored. The report flops in PR terms.

This is another tale that’s been around the block a few times:

  • Pressure group Z doesn’t have any budget but understands PR far better than industry behemoth X.
  • It makes a mountain out a molehill by taking a nothing story and relating it to a day-to-day human experience e.g. the equivalent of say “paracetamol will kill you” without mentioning that you would have to take 100 tablets or whatever to do so (to be fair, plenty of NGOs and the like publish material that is much less controversial, but you get the gist.)
  • Pressure group Z gets loads more press than Company X got for its crumby report.
  • Company X responds to the story with a press release a week later rather than responding to it immediately using online crisis communications tactics that have more impact.

What are the lessons for corporate players in all of this? Each of these points could be a blog post in itself (if not something much longer), but in short:

  • Re. the last point, clearly, your crisis communications requires an online element.
  • Most of all though, don’t get caught up in trying to win hearts and minds through science and fact alone. Nobody cares about science, however spuriously, if their family’s health may be at risk.
  • Don’t let business people, academics, engineers or scientists decide on your story. You need communicators on board.
  • Don’t just make it about defensive communication and proving that you’re not as bad as they say. So your substance isn’t that harmful (or whatever) but is your organisation really doing good deeds in the long run? If not, it should.
  • Treat pressure groups with respect, engage in dialogue, show them that you do good things, and they might even be nice to you. Or at least be less outrageous.
  • And I have to say this considering my line of work… Go online and develop a super web presence to engage directly with the public and explain your story to them without intermediaries. Media relations is important, of course, but the press is likely to side with pressure groups more often than not, no matter what you say or do (and if you’re truly nasty, deservedly so!) Why? Because they’re the nice guys and readers like them more than you.

EP elections: parties get your acts together!

parliament~_mothershi_101bI’m not an expert on the minutiae of European politics – for more in-depth analysis of the elections I’d recommend proper Euroblogs like Julien Frisch, The European Citizen, Nosemonkey and Grahnlaw – but there’s one “layman’s” observation I would make.

Low turnouts and the success of a number of unsavoury fringe parties (as well as the failure of the centre-left to make up ground on the centre-right despite the financial crisis “gift”) is likely going to be blamed in some smug quarters on a cynical media and stupid and/or gullible voters. Or if not that, on the fact that voters have become too individualistic to care about serious politics and wider community matters.

But what about the failure of many mainstream parties – especially those on the centre-left – to offer voters a real sense that they offer a helping hand in trying times? I think that’s far more critical. Sure, the media may be a tad cynical, but have entire electorates suddenly gone dim-witted? Hardly. Have we all turned into materialistic egomaniacs? Maybe, but I doubt charity donations would be at an all time high if that were so. Perhaps it’s fair to say that it’s not an easy time to be a political party. People don’t vote along party lines like they used to (largely because social class does not matter much anymore in political terms) while there aren’t that many issues on which parties can really stand out seeing as they all pretty much straddle the middle ground.

Nonetheless, it’s certainly the case that plenty of Europeans feel utterly estranged from political parties . What should they do about it? For a start, try to be more representative and not appear so detached; be less dismissive and most of all to be more communicative. It means surveying constituents and acting on results. And as an advocate for all things online, I’d say more than anything it means members of parties communicating online directly with their constituents and making it an absolute priority to engage in daily dialogue even if it takes up a sizable chunk of working hours.

And if that fails? More proportional representation and direct democracy perhaps, but that opens up a whole new kettle of fish.

Event in Brussels: Organisations and online communications

Following on from an event at the IABC last week, ZN are hosting a follow-up event on June 18th. I’ll be there to give a brief introduction to an eBook on a model for online engagement which I’m currently working on (or to be fair, have very good intentions of starting ASAP.)

Details of the event here.

Aggregation in practice: 3 issues dashboards

I’m always writing about aggreration and aggregators i.e. “a web application which aggregates syndicated web content such as news headlines, blogs, podcasts, and vlogs in a single location for easy viewing (Wikipedia)”

Aggregation can be extremely valuable in two respects in particular:

  • As a learning tool: you’re being fed content from a wide array of sources – issue, market, sector or personal interest news – constantly and with little effort; great for keeping on top of developments
  • As part of your content strategy: add third party content to your own sites, enriching your content without actually producing any yourself and increasing credibility via third-party association

At ZN, we’ve created what we call “issues dashboards” on energy, food and environment, bringing in feeds from a number of sources as well as via keywords from search engines. Here they are:

If you have other sources to recommend please let us know.

MEP trends survey: some more thoughts

I wrote about the EP Digital Trends survey the other day – a godsend to people like me who often face the inevitable comment “yeah, but MEPs don’t use the web” – as it highlights that they in fact do indeed use it,  primarily for search, but even to (shock horror) read blogs. James, whose team published the survey, has written a post describing what the results actually mean to PA practitioners, essentially detailing how they must make sure that they combine their advoacy and media relations with a sound online search and content strategy.

I wholeheartedly agree. I’d also add that beyond ensuring that their content is found, there’s a lot they can do to ensure that the content might actually influence an MEP’s view of an issue. MEPs are accountable to their constituents, so even if your content is top-tier and convincing, you still need to prove to them that voters are on your side (or at least a good portion of them.) To do so I think you need to match content and search strategies with a broader engagement strategy. Here’s a few first thoughts (not all applicable to all issues and organisations, but it’s a start):

  • Adopt a portal approach: don’t just showcase your own content but bring in good-quality third-party material that backs up your case and gives you credibility by association. If you really trust your sources, you can automate the process via aggregation.
  • Similar sort of thing: make stakeholders your “ambassadors” by showcasing them on your site directly, ideally using video. Bite-sized interviews and preferably basic production standards, and you’ve got something a lot more powerful than a written “key message.”
  • Appeal to potential supporters (assuming you have some) by adopting a really personalised approach. Don’t just have good, sober content but also one or more personal blogs or vlogs which show the real you. This then becomes a mechanism for stakeholder dialogue, where people can comment and you can personally engage with them.
  • Use multiple channels if you have the resources and feel your audiences are scattered – social networks, Twitter etc. – but stay on message and lead people back to your main site. The latter point is key: always ensure that everything you do is showcased in your main “hub” i.e. via one URL.
  • Make your online platform a “community” rather than a mere site (you’re already half-way there if you’ve taken some of the steps above.) Not meaning that you recreate Facebook on your €20,000 site; but rather that you make it a place where plenty of people, within your organisation or not, are featured and engage in some way. These people will then be more likely to mobilise on your behalf and help spread your message; a sort of Obama effect in miniature.

And here’s the bonus. If done well, you haven’t just put mechanisms in motion that will help convince MEPs directly if they find your content online. You’ve also got yourself a fully fledged eCampaign that could spread online (again, scope really depends on the issue and organisation in question!) and influence the wider debate. And eventually your MEPs might not just hear about you via you own channels; they might even hear indirectly via their constituents or traditional media that’s picked up the story. It’s come full circle, and that should really be your end-goal.